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But my brother in law, whose father was a lumberjack in his younger years, got a sharp lumberjack style key for his fifth birthday. "He better learn to handle it as soon as possible. And to keep it sharp." A dull knife is far more dangerous than a sharp one. And if a five year old cuts his finger, he doesn't have the force to seriously injure himself, and his body heals much faster than the body of a grown man. So let him cut himself while he is young, then he learns.

You got lots of things like that. I was out in bad snowstorm with my daughter when she was ten, and she proved that she could dress up for a snowstorm. I read enough books to her when she was little that she could handle adult themes very early (she read Umberto Eco: The name of the rose, at eleven). You can teach a six year old to swim in a cold river stream. You can early make kids familiar with visual and other information that some people think should wait until they turn eighteen; if they have encountered this sort of information is a safe and assuring framework, they will not be hurt by it.

Kids kan handle a lot more roughness than modern Western parents seem to believe today. Bringing them up to never experienced any hardship, any stress, any danger, any threat, is NOT protecting them. It is making them vulnurable.

As this is a computer based forum, I'll include a computer related story:

I am so old (and that partially explains why I am not over-protective!) that when I started my University Comp.Sci studies, we wrote our Fortran code on coding sheets, that the punching ladies wrote to card stacks, which we had to read into that huge, batch oriented mainframe. Depending on the load, turnaround was from 24 to 72 hours before we could read the compiler's error messages, so we could replace cards in the stack with corrected ones and submit for anoter 24 to 72 hours turnaround.

After Chistmas, we called for a class meeting to direct a complaint to the University, describing how bad we felt the learning environment. One of the very brightest girls in the class failed to see the problem: Why did it matter if we recieved the printoout from the run a little later? When you've solved the programming problem, the work is done, isn't it? ... After some discussion, it dawned upon us that this girl had never seen an error message, after half a year as a Comp.Sci. student - she had done everything perfectly correct on the very first try (and her handwriting on the coding form so clear that the punching ladies never made a single error transferring them to cards). Once she had left the room, one of the others made a sigh: Poor girl! and we all nodded confirmingly. If you have never been corrected by the compiler (or runtime system) in half a year, you have missed something very important!

It must be said that this girl got her share of error messages in later university courses, and she turned into a very successful and respected software designer. But hardships is a fundamental element of growing up.

Today I happen to wear a T-shirt stating: "Experience, the ability to recognize a mistake when you repeat it". I think it is relevant here.

We've had a difficult time finding/keeping qualified applicants for a DoD contract SQL developer position. I'm astounded at our track record since November:

- We had a reasonably qualified developer for about six months, but she got fed up with the company's inability to manage her health care stuff correctly, so she quit. She had no certifications.

- Her replacement wasn't even into his third day of employment when he quit because the company he came from offered him a big pay raise to come back. I never got a chance to talk to the guy, so I don't know what his skill set was like.

- His replacement had no discernible SQL skills AT ALL, despite what he had on his resume. We let him go on Thursday, and he was only on the job for about a month.

WTF has happened to the talent pool that seems so crowded when I'm looking for a job change?

The DoD makes it very difficult to hire new IT people. They must already have a current Security+ cert (difficult to find people with this cert), and won't allow anyone access to the database server without some sort of provable training in SQL. The contract for the seat doesn't mention the SQL training part, but I suppose it will now after the last guy, in the form of a required MCSA cert for SQL developer and BIDS.

I'm the only developer supporting about 100 people, and the work is backing up, because not only do I have to service new requests, but I have to maintain years-old stuff (from as far back as SQL Server 2005) that has NO DOCUMENTATION. The last SQL dev they had wrote a bunch of SQL jobs that require annual changes every fiscal year, and created static tables that need to be updated MANUALLY "every once in a while" (determined when some app somewhere stops showing expected data).

Not only do I have to do WPF desktop apps, SQL, BIDS, and Qlikview, it's starting to look like I'll need to learn SSRS, and SharePoint, too, and I' have absolutely no interest in learning SharePoint.

On top of all of that, we expect to be updating our database server to SQL Server 2016 sometime in September (just before the new fiscal year), and we have over 300 SQL jobs to migrate. Further, there doesn't appear to be any consideration of updating tools to do the BIDS stuff. We're still on VS2013 and using VS2008 to do the ssis packages. I was hoping to have another SQL developer on staff to help out with that, but it's not looking promising.

".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010-----You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010-----When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013

You don't know how to ease my pain
You don't know what the sound is darlin'
It's the sound of my tears fallin'
Or is it the rain?
You don't know how to play the game
You cheat
You lie
You make me wanna cry
You make me wanna cry
Cry...

Yes, I know this, but I'm over 60 and it's difficult to muster the energy (much less the desire) to go through the interview process which invariably includes pointless quizzes about esoteric constructs with fancy new names that don't really mean anything. I have become so reliant on google as a ready reference, that I have stopped trying to remember how I did something after I did it. There's just too much to know.

It seems that most jobs are only 6-months long, or they want "full stack" developers (another way of saying they don't want to hire enough people to do the job right) that can work on a technology mix that would make most real programmers wince in pain, and nine times out of ten, all they want is to hire someone long enough to clean up the last guy's mess, or to implement some tech agenda based on some idiot manager's wrong-headed view of how things should work.

".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010-----You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010-----When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013

Sorry, life doesn't work like that - it's all a trade off. You want a better job - you have to go through the pain. If you want to move to SoCal I have junior dev role going... (Ducks as JSP takes aim).

We (the people in my department) only know what about 50 of them actually do... because no documentation, except for the 50 that I've touched/created.

".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010-----You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010-----When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013

Well looks like documenting them would be a project itself and someone needs to get that done to get the juice flowing...if you follow some standards these shouldn't happen, people leaving without submitting the documentation, there should be some place where it should be... unless its all self documented ass comments in the jobs itself....

Caveat Emptor.

"Progress doesn't come from early risers – progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things." Lazarus Long

No comments in the job, the sql steps, the ssis packages, nor in any external documents - except for the jobs I implemented or modified.

When something breaks, I have to start at the thing that broke and work backwards to discover the full processing sequence. At that point, I document it, and only then will I attempt to fix it. It takes as many as four hours to discover, at least one hour to document it, and very little time to actually fix it.

".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010-----You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010-----When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013

Sounds like you are in the cat-bird seat in terms of asking for more $

cheers, Bill

«... thank the gods that they have made you superior to those events which they have not placed within your own control, rendered you accountable for that only which is within you own control For what, then, have they made you responsible? For that which is alone in your own power—a right use of things as they appear.» Discourses of Epictetus Book I:12

I had a security clearance from my aerospace engineering career in the 80s & 90s that had long elapsed. But just having had a clearance, I got a gig in the 00s doing some Visual C++ work for some type of "situational awareness" application, and I think what made me stand out was that I had had a clearance, so it was a bit easier to get a temporary clearance (I can't remember the term, but it was like a quickie that was all that I needed to get to work behind the "safe" door).

This situation has arisen because employers don't want to invest anything in their employees, and would rather just buy skills, or in this case, a clearance, off the shelf. If I were still in the business, you can bet your sweet bippy that I would jump around to chase the dead Presidents. Oh, and H1Bs can't get this clearance; they can't even work in a NOFORN office.

The only problem with a clearance is that if you travel abroad a lot, it looks suspicious.

It's extremely difficult to hire and retain good talent, whether it's software engineers or DBEs. If you lower the bar regarding quality/ability, then the pool is large. But when you do not have the luxury of that compromise, there is a serious lack of quality candidates. Also, most companies are not prepared to raise the stakes for a high quality candidate.

The contracting company is restricted on what they can pay due to the bid price of the contract. The government uses the "lowest bid" model, which results in these low-money-ceiling contracts that result in less skilled contractor employees because the contractor did not submit a bid that would allow for higher skilled people to be hired. In order to hire someone of sufficient skill, they would have to effectively eliminate a person from the contract, which would jeopardize the company's ability to retain ownership of the contract at the end of the fiscal year.

A contractor bidding on a contract does not have to have personnel on their roster to even fulfill the needs of the contract. Currently the company that won the bid simply hire the existing people that are filling the seat. The last time this happened to me, they tried to get everyone on the contract to take lower pay in order to retain their positions. I told them, "Not only no, but f*ck no", and then went on to tell them that they would be hard pressed to replace me with someone that had even an equal skill set at the money I was making, while reminding them of the certifications that were required for my seat before the government would even consider letting them hire someone (Security+ CE, MCSA, and secret clearance).

I am their unicorn for that seat, and I hope the contract goes up for re-compete this year. I will probably be more forceful in my negotiations for pay and time off. I am confident that the group I work for will require that they keep me.

".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010-----You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010-----When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013